Andrea Pitzer writes:

Last week, I got a message from journalist Charles Davis. He asked me to comment for an article about a call for contractors he’d noticed on Sam.gov. The U.S. government, it seemed, was looking for businesses to partner with the Department of Homeland Security and ICE, and to fulfill other U.S. Government operational needs overseas.

This particular search for partners to collaborate with DHS was framed as maintaining a fleet of aircraft for use in its operations. But the “Statement of Work” also mentions creating facilities outside the U.S. that might hold as many as 1,000 people.

For the most part, these overseas hubs are referred to as “International Staging Areas” or ISAs. But one paragraph in the solicitation refers to a “detention facility, or facilities,” as well as “detainees.” The description is ambiguous, but it appears these sites will host what may become transit camps for some detainees, and endpoint detention camps for others.

If you’re thinking that all this is starting to sound like a global network of concentration camps run by the U.S., you’re not alone. Davis quotes me in the piece he posted over on the Redoubt (which is worth reading, too). But I want to address this document directly and at greater length from the vantage point of camp history. I’ll use some information from my book One Long Night (which traces the global establishment of concentration camps from the late nineteenth century into the twenty-first century) to explain the tremendous danger that such a network would represent. [Continue reading…]